A curious thing happened this holiday season, I kinda fell in love with Instagram just a little bit, and out of love with Flickr, just a little bit. Which, given that I used to work at Flickr way back in the day is an odd feeling.
When Instagram first came out I scoffed at it, filters, borders, faux retro and all that, me, I was sticking with Flickr. Flickr had all my friends on, it’s where the comments and conversations took place, everyone was over at Flickr, I’d invested years into it so why switch (or augment it with other tools)?
And then Instagram rolled out version 2, allowing much larger images to be stored and the ability to get rid of the sodding borders. People I follow on twitter started mentioning good things about it, I of course ignored them, ’cause Flickr is where it’s at don’t cha know! Then I caved in and downloaded it.
Suddenly I discovered that most of my Flickr friends were already on it, and they were having conversations on Instagram, sharing jokes, punning photos around hash-tags, generally having a good time, even though it wasn’t Flickr. Even though they were posting the photos to Flickr, the party it seems had mainly moved to Instagram.
It’s like they’d all been having photo fun behind my back… bastards!
How dare they be using something else while I was faithfully still using Flickr.
So ignoring that fact that I’d help build Flickr I started snapping away with Instagram, it was easy, frictionless, and dare I say it, I even liked some of the filters. Everything that the Flickr iPhone app wasn’t.
Then Christmas happened…
The days before Christmas, friends were sharing photos of the build-up, putting up the tree, wrapping presents, sitting on trains getting to parents houses, cooking hams. To me there was a real sense of flow, connection, joining in of everyone’s experience, a bit like a pictorial version of twitter to some degree.
Christmas morning was almost magical.
The previous year on Flickr was almost as magical, once people had a chance to sort through the 100s of photos they’d taken with their dSLR, pick out the best ones, run them through lightroom and then get a chance to upload them. It was nice to look back on the Christmas mornings that people had, rather than having.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy Flickr. It makes me think about photography, inspires possible projects to play with, upload proper photos taken with my proper camera. But when there’s something happening (often involving the kids, a cat or a visual joke I know my friends will get) I find myself reaching for the iPhone and uploading to Instagram.
This Christmas I kinda fell in love with Instagram just a little bit, and out of love with Flickr, just a little bit.
[Update: Instagram and Flickr, the one where I refine my argument]
Welcome to the club! ;)
Now we just need to figure out how best to do machine tags on Instagram…
[...] Comments « My first Instagram Christmas, a nervous step away from Flickr [...]
interes distinction dan – the instantness of having vs had. i thought it was another filter-a-thon until i realised what instagram *is*: it’s a new *network*. a successful updating of moblogging for the now.
neat.
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